“Gelb said the Ring probably will return in five or six years and the Met has not decided whether to present a new production or another revival of Lepage’s staging, which was maligned by several critics.”
“‘I can’t tell you how many people came up to me during intermissions when I was in the space of the house telling me how much they love this production,’ he said. ‘It was almost like hearing people telling me not to throw away the Bohème of (Franco) Zeffirelli’.” [AP]
Representing the end of the world is a challenge for any opera company, especially when said apocalypse comes as the culmination of eighteen hours of Norse epic. Yet, at the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm, bringing the cycle to an anticlimactic conclusion. Read more »
“In what may be an interesting analysis for many readers, Kreuzer then considers Robert Lepage’s widely disseminated Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, arguing that the ‘most authentic aspect of Lepage’s production is the overall failure of its illusionist agenda’ due to technical glitches (p. 231).” [College Music Symposium]
New York City Opera presents the world premiere of Iain Bell and Mark Campbell’s Stonewall. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the uprising, Stonewall is a moving and explosive new American opera that captures the rage, grit, humor and, finally, hope of the LGBTQ+ community’s uprising in a Greenwich Village dance club on one hot night in June 1969. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, June 21-28. Read more »
So, another way Anthony Tommasini might have put this is, “Robert Lepage‘s direction of a crucial scene in the Ring is even worse than Otto Schenk‘s, if such a thing is possible.”
Much like Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which launched the Met’s 2016-2017 season, Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin is an opera about love and death.
After five flops in a row, Mr. McVicar continues to win new assignments from the Met.
So finally we can see what the Robert Lepage Ring would have looked like if only the Machine hadn’t been totally fucked.
The next scheduled appearance of the Met’s Ring production has been canceled, as irrevocably as these things can ever be.
Cher Public